Punished and isolated: disabled prisoners in Norway

Abstract

Serving a sentence has two purposes in Norway; it is a punishment for a crime and it is considered as an opportunity for rehabilitation to prevent repeated crime. This presupposes that all prisoners have access to activities and common rooms in the prisons. Interviews with prisoners with hearing or mobility impairments showed that accessibility is a problem in many prisons. The experiences of prisoners with hearing or mobility impairment show that lack of awareness and preparedness for their situation causes isolation as well as a decline in physical and mental health. Some prisons had cells partially adapted for prisoners with disabilities – and these were mostly located in high-security units. A majority of Norwegian prisons have some experience with disabled prisoners, but there are no systems for knowledge accumulation or sharing within the Norwegian Correctional Service. Lack of accessibility also deprived some disabled prisoners of their legal right to progression of the conditions for serving their sentences, and they served under more severe conditions for longer periods than non-disabled prisoners. Due to the lack of accommodation and access to health care and rehabilitation measures in prisons, they run the risk of serving a sentence without access to rehabilitation.

Keywords:

• sentence
• prisons
• rehabilitation
• isolation

Notes

1. Pratt (2008a, 2008b) has defined this policy as ‘Scandinavian Exceptionalism’. Not only are the conditions in Scandinavian prisons considerably better than in prisons in most other countries in the world, but the level of imprisonment is also considerably lower. This article is written in a Scandinavian context, and is anchored in a Scandinavian view on prisons and the dual purpose of prisons (punishment and rehabilitation) embedded in the penal policy in these countries.

2. The approach to impairment and disability (and the relationship between these) in this article may be positioned in a critical disability studies tradition, where the problems faced by disabled people are conceptualized as emerging in a relationship between impairment and oppression. This approach is partially in opposition to the material approach in the social model of disability as well as the individualized medical approach (Corker 1999; Vehmas and Watson 2014).

3. We asked specifically that at least one of the impairments that was possible to identify by others should be related to sight, hearing or mobility. The terms we eventually used were (in Norwegian); ‘tunghørt’, ‘døv’, ‘blind’, ‘svaksynt’, ‘halt’, ‘bruke rullestol eller stokk’ and more. Not all of these concepts are considered as good or correct professional language, but they worked to make the officers identify and/or remember target prisoners, and the concepts were also used spontaneously by some officers when they discussed their experiences with disabled prisoners. We asked specifically that at least one of the impairments that was possible to identify by others should be related to sight, hearing or mobility. Some of the identified prisoners had more than one impairment, which possibly also intersected in terms of practical challenges.

4. Overgangsbolig.

5. The average number of prisoners serving sentence at a given time was 3704 in 2010 (Kriminalomsorgens sentrale forvaltning 2011).

6. The researchers did not know the identity of these prisoners, only their existence and some very superficial knowledge about their impairment or disability, like ‘wheelchair user’, ‘has hearing aids’, ‘problems with walking’ and so forth.

7. The officers were informed about the purpose of the interviews, and gave informed consent to use quotations from the interviews, based on oral information about the intentions. No personal information about or from the officers was collected.